I am sorry to interrupt. It may that I am going deaf, but the volume seems a little low in here today. I do not know if anyone can flick a switch or something to try to get it turned up, or perhaps the witnesses could speak closer to the microphone. It was just a little difficult to hear at this end.

Roy Pinnock: Yes, although there is another resourcing issue around entering into and administering planning performance agreements. There is a cultural shift that needs to go on around how applications are project managed. That is true of the commercial sector, in terms of how it approaches negotiating section 106 agreements, when it looks at conditions in the application process and how much it is prepared to take things on at the earliest stage.
There is also an issue around how to programme-manage people’s diaries. Within an authority, you need sign-off from transport, the education aspect of the authority and housing officers. At the moment, you cannot get a meeting. I have waited three months for an authority to sit down. We said, “Look, there’s no point us sending ping-pong emails on this agreement because you keep telling us everything is not agreed. We just want to sit around the table with everyone and understand your views.” That is impossible, and it is partly due to the chaos, unfortunately, that is going on because of the multiple restructurings and the lack of resource.

Roy Pinnock: Yes. No plan survives contact with reality. There is always dialogue. There should be dialogue in planning; it is fundamental. I think BPF members value pre-application discussions but recognise that once you are in the mix, having submitted the application, the most important thing is how you project and programme manage those discussions so that you know when local authority resources are available. The crucial thing is that we preserve the ability to have a sensible dialogue about quality, but drain off some of the issues involving technical things, which can be addressed by model planning obligations and model conditions.

Chris Philp: Q  Finally, on the question of pre-commencements, are there any particular conditions or parts of the planning process that you think are particularly onerous or absurd and would like to draw the Committee’s attention to? It might be anything to do great crested newts, for example, without wishing to lead the witnesses.

Andrew Whitaker: You are absolutely right and we agree with you. There are many stages in the planning process at which a local planning authority can reflect the community, in many instances, by asking what are the important things that need to be considered as part of the development of a site. They can do that when they allocate the site in a local plan—they can set out various matters that will need to be addressed as part of the development. That can be done by the community themselves at a neighbourhood plan level; it can be done as part of the pre-application and consultation discussion, with the potential applicant, of the issues that the local authority will want to be addressed via the planning application process; and it can then be discussed as part of the planning application process itself, prior to a decision being made. It can also be addressed as part of a planning condition attached to the planning permission.
At all those stages, one can quite legitimately raise any issue that one sees as being key to the planning decision, whether that is archaeology, bats and newts, or any other issue—for example, drainage is often seen  as causing delay. Some of those issues will be so critical to whether the development is allowed to go ahead that they should, of course, be addressed very early on in the planning process.
If my local plan allocated a site but said, “This is a difficult site to drain. We will want to see all drainage details sorted out as part of the planning application. We are not going to leave this to a planning condition because it is fundamental to how much development you are allowed to put on the site, depending on your drainage scheme.”, the developer would accept that as a constraint and would submit a detailed drainage scheme with their planning application. It is up to the local planning authority to then say, “Okay, this is an important issue for this site. Is the proposed drainage system capable of mitigating the drainage issues and should we approve the planning application on the basis of the scheme submitted with it?” The problem we see is that a lot of local authorities say, “We haven’t got time to do that now. We will make a planning condition that says that, prior to the commencement of the development, we want to agree a drainage system for the site.”
As I have previously explained, frequently, all that happens is that you submit exactly the same drainage system as was submitted with the planning application, or the same mitigation for wildlife, or the same detail that you knew was critical to the determination of your planning application later down the line as a pre-commencement planning condition, rather than it being sorted out as part of the original planning application. We think there are lots and lots of points along the planning journey at which the things that are key to the development of sites can be sorted out. The Bill does not change that at all.

Rebecca Pow: Q  Shall we just put that to Mr Dixon? Do you think that would that help small and medium-sized developers as well?

Andrew Dixon: It could be a useful addition to the system. By and large, and perhaps we are being too optimistic, we do not think it is very likely that there will be protracted negotiations about the use of pre-commencement conditions. The aim should be for some of those conversations to be conducted fairly simply and fairly quickly. We are perhaps a bit more optimistic, particularly around smaller applications, about the scope for huge controversy in those conversations. We think the most important things is that that conversation takes place at an early point in the process.

Gavin Barwell: Q  Yes. I think we will go on to discuss this when we get to line-by-line consideration, but the difficulty is that when an inspector looks at a condition, it is difficult to judge it in the absence of the overall application, because the council would say that the condition is necessary to make the overall application acceptable. It is difficult to just look at one condition in the absence of the overall package.
My last question is for Mr Pinnock. I understand the point you are making that there will still be an issue if this Bill goes through as it stands. I want to challenge you on what you said, that people would be in no better a position at all. At the moment, as an applicant, if you do not like the conditions attached to your application, you can appeal. I would argue that there is a beneficial step here in that, now, authorities will not be able to attach conditions that you do not agree to. The authority would have to feel so strongly about one of these pre-commencement conditions as to turn down permission for the whole application. Do you not think that it is at least going to reduce the number of cases where there is a problem, even if it will not eliminate the problem all together?

Chris Philp: Sorry can you say that again?

Councillor Newman: I do not think it would be beyond somebody to construct the model, but the key test would the outcome—whether the planning process was working well, or was speeded up, depending on what the local challenge was.

Helen Hayes: Q  I have a further question for Duncan Wilson. You mentioned concerns about archaeology. It seems there have been indications from  the Government that some assurance might provided around the question of archaeology, and we will wait to see what comes forward in that regard. Are there other areas of heritage about which you have potential concerns relating to pre-commencement planning conditions?

Hugh Ellis: You can still see neighbourhood plans upended because of the tensions that exist about whether we have a plan-led system, which is probably another three-hour debate. In a nutshell, the difficulty we have the moment is that because of the tension between the national planning policy framework presumption in policy in favour development and the legal presumption in favour of the development plan, you can find circumstances where a brand-new development plan can be rendered out of date because of its performance on five-year land supply—literally within months of adoption, rendering the entire framework of housing policy in that plan out of date. If they have adopted neighbourhood plans in support of that plan, then communities can quite understandably feel confused about that. That is a wider issue about the status of whether we have plan-led system. For us, that balance needs some attention, to say the least.

Hugh Ellis: It is. I think the Government produced some statistics about that. It has been one of the really positive surprises about the neighbourhood planning process. On housing, there are positive ways forward. On whether or not neighbourhood plans offer the full range of issues that planning needs to cover in a local area, the evidence we have is that they probably do not. But then, that is not what they are being set up to do. That is why I ask, is the ambition is for them to be a kind of replacement for the local plan, or not? In our view, you need both. Neighbourhood plans are great at articulating community aspiration inside the local plan framework. When both work together very powerfully, that can be a very strong framework for a community.